By Dario Cecchi
Dario Cecchi is a professor of philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome. This article initially appeared on Fata Morgana Web and is reprinted here with permission.
Author’s Note
Italy is the European country in which COVID-19 first started its spread and the one in which the number of infected people is the highest, although other countries in Europe are rapidly reaching the same level of contagion. Cultural debate on the pandemic in Italy was immediately wide, including not only scientists but also journalists, writers, managers and, last but not least, philosophers. In particular, Giorgio Agamben allegedly argued that the pandemic is not real, but rather a social construction. He was attacked for his positions, and we witnessed for a few days a revival of the quarrel between “hermeneutics” and “realism.” Maurizio Ferraris proposed to call this new field of studies “post-coronial.” Meanwhile, we witnessed a large movement of public interventions in favor of the introduction of a new app, which is supposed to map the presence of newly infected individuals, and thus contain the diffusion of the virus. Around 60% of the population is expected to join the project in order for it to be effective. This proposal also triggered a debate, pro and contra, echoed by foreign voices such as Yuval Noah Harari, who expressed his political, ethical, and legal concerns about this possibility. These concerns raise the possibility that new forms of discrimination or prejudice could originate from the fact of testing positive for the virus, or even from being exposed to potentially risky situations. Furthermore, as things stand, it is not clear whether this technology would be implemented by a private company, or would be under the control of the public authority. By the way, the delegation of some public functions to private subjects is already in action at the moment: schools and universities, whose large majority belongs to the state system in Italy, are often using private platforms, such as Google Meet or Classroom, to let the academic year continue during the quarantine. The limits of privacy and the use (and transparency) of big data, as well as the separation of public and private in the exercise of fundamental social functions such as education and health, are therefore two principal issues in Italy (and Europe) at the present moment. The present article was originally published in Italian, on the blog Fata Morgana Web; on the spur of the moment, I tried to formulate my reflections upon some of the abovementioned issues.
The profusion of philosophical interventions and polemics on the pandemic, at least in Italy, should lead to silence. On the other hand, many of those who intervened have grasped that, in a moment that is itself critical, the issue is to rethink the critical function of philosophy. In fact, what philosophy can do is not to describe the current state of affairs, but to grasp the symptoms of a world to come. Antonio Scurati sharply writes in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera on March 25: “How can I explain to my daughter that, when I look out the window, I see the end of an era? The era in which she was born but that she will not know, the era of the longest and calmest period of peace and prosperity enjoyed by the history of humanity. I live in Milan, until yesterday the most advanced, most brilliant and richest city in Italy, one of the most desirable in the world. The city of fashion, design and Expo. The city of the aperitif, which gave the world the Negroni sbagliato and the ‘happy hour’ and which today is the world capital of COVID-19.”
It is the end of postmodernism, the era in which ideologies are fashions and fashions can rise to ideologies; in which nothing is really serious, because history ended with the end of Cold War. One of the most influential interpreters of Hegel in the 20th century, Alexander Kojève argues that, once the path of human history has been accomplished, men have no choice but to spend the time that remains as if it were free time, in a world reduced to an arena of pastimes. Coronavirus forces our awareness that this is not the case: if we had not already understood it after natural cataclysms, the risk of nuclear disasters, and the looming threat of a general environmental catastrophe, today it is nature that sets in motion the history machine. It is an enormous trauma for humankind, especially in the Western world, accustomed to think that the “dominion of nature” was now, for better or for worse, an acquired fact. And it is natural that the reaction is extreme, oscillating between denial and apocalypse, between saying that the epidemic is only a social or cultural construction—as Giorgio Agamben was accused of doing—and saying that we will never go back to life as we knew it before. Allow me to observe that both the first and the second theses are only different and opposite Weltanschauungen, which, starting from a perception of the current state, try to immediately formulate a norm to follow. But who, philosopher or not, could honestly tell her or his daughter, perhaps older than Scurati’s, to go with friends and have an aperitif during the quarantine, supposing that this is only the effect of a “biopolitical” construction? Or who could tell her that she will never know life—affectively, socially, professionally, or intellectually—outside of a latent but constant state of quarantine, in which existences should preferably be conducted in the privacy of a home, possibly replacing one’s own physical body with a virtual one? It is evident that both philosophers would commit a “philosophical sin”: namely, to hurriedly set up a philosophy of the future that justifies present positions.
Perhaps it is better to go back to one of the masters of the 20th-century philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin, and try to develop more suitable tools to analyze current events and their possible consequences. As Scholem points out, in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin presents not one but two figures of the time to come: the Angel and the Messiah. If the Angel represents a vision of time aimed at the past, at human tragedies and therefore at the end of history as a definitive catastrophe, the Messiah represents the possibility, uncertain as to how and when, of its redemption: uncertain, I would also add, about the ultimate character of this redemption. The Angel and the Messiah are in an irreducible dialectical tension; the Angel, or the accumulation of evil in the world, is not subordinated to the Messiah as the necessary premise for the final victory of the good. It is up to human beings to grasp the relationship between the two in the present time, interpreting the “signs of the times,” to use an expression that Benjamin would certainly have liked. It is a way of understanding what Benjamin calls the “dialectical image”: not a Weltanschauung, a perception of things that surreptitiously wants to rule them, but an image that shows new aspects of things and consequently proposes their possible developments, just as a painting or a film are not a perfect copy of reality photographed in an instant, but a framed and moving (the latter not only in cinema) representation put in perspective.
The point is to find the poles around which a dialectical image of the present can be reconstructed. If we follow Benjamin’s method, this work often passes through apparently secondary phenomena, not infrequently in the media and mediations of the experience they offer, as Richard Grusin explained in his seminal article “Radical Mediation,” published in Critical Inquiry in 2015, and as Angela Maiello reaffirmed recently about COVID-19. This is the case, in my view, of the app which in the future should allow us to know in real time if we have come into contact with virus-positive subjects. The idea is to consider this kind of app, or similar devices, not only as technologies, but also as operators of a dialectical image, a prism through which it is possible to read the experience of the upcoming era.
The enormous flow of data to which we have been subjected for years, being actively involved in it as Maurizio Ferraris has shown, would be put at the service of prevention. From the columns of The Financial Times, Yuval Noah Harari stated his strong doubts on similar interventions of technology into our lives, highlighting the problems related to privacy and even expressing his concern for the fate of liberal democracies. To his concerns, also in Il Corriere della Sera on March 25, Vittorio Colao replies: “I wonder whether all Italians would not want to be notified immediately and decide to be swabbed if they knew to have been in contact with an infected person.” It seems to me that the question is rather to ask what such an app could do. Can it help one avoid a priori undesired contact or can it, more realistically, only reconstruct the map of a (potential) contact that has already occurred? Tertium non datur: either it happens that a subject knows she or he is positive and, if circulating, violates the terms of quarantine; or she or he doesn’t know it, unwittingly causing potential harm to others. In the case of an indiscriminate application of the principle of preventive control, we would therefore witness the deactivation of a legal device, based on the principle of habeas corpus, a guarantee that the limitations of personal freedom are justified by a need for public order or by the presence of a body of evidence, for the sake of the extension of a police device conceived after the axioms of surveillance, punishment, and segregation.
Only the second option, mapping a posteriori possible outbreaks of infection, seems to have a real possibility of application. It could be used to prepare targeted and limited containment measures, and would provide data for a more effective health action. If we all agreed to download the app, as soon as someone was infected, we could reconstruct the network of her or his movements from the presumed moment of the infection, and act accordingly. But the point is that not everybody can rely on the protection of personal data. Because it is impossible, Colao says openly, that such a system could work with “anonymous” data: data would perhaps be connected to a “pseudonym” and be therefore not anonymous, but at least not “transparent.”
However, we must ask ourselves what kind of new sensitivity we would be induced to develop by perceiving ourselves and others as bearers of a signal of potential danger. To say it in Benjamin’s words, we must ask ourselves what sort of new “technical innervation,” what relationship between technologies and our sensitivity, we would be so exposed to, and with what effects. It is very likely that this situation—exactly because we do not reject its challenges, including technological ones, but face them critically—will lead us to reconsider one of the “myths of progress” that characterized the era between the 20thand 21st century. I would define this myth in the following way: the perfect coincidence between “infosphere” and “mediasphere,” that is, between the exponential growth of the flow of data (big data) and the whirling increase in the possibilities of communication and exposure of oneself through new technologies. It doesn’t matter here whether it is a matter of showing bodies modelled by fitness or denouncing the repression conducted by a totalitarian regime by any sort of minority or dissenters. On the one hand, there is the ideal of a preventive regulation of life; on the other hand, the increase of interaction in favor of the individual, of the niche, even of the swerve from the ordinary flow of exchanges through media. These are two spheres that insist on the same technological apparatus: one app aims at preventing a massive contagion, another app makes you meet your soul mate. Avoiding the barbarization of our common ethos also means asking ourselves if it is not appropriate to draw clearer boundaries between “data” and “communication.” This implies, among other things, avoiding possible drifts, such as bullying the alleged plague spreader, to express myself with the jargon of modern times. But it also means dispelling the illusion that it is possible to annihilate the irreducible nucleus of time that is the event, which is ultimately the encounter with something or someone, for the sake of preventing a contagion.
Bibliography
- W. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, ed. by H. Arendt, Schocken, New York 1968, pp. 253-264.
- M. Ferraris, Mobilitazione totale, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2015.
- R. Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42 No. 1 (Autumn 2015), pp. 124-148
- A. Maiello, “When We Are the Medium (of the Virus)”, Thinking C21 blog.
- P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità, Cortina, Milano 2014.
- G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin and His Angel, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. by W.J. Dannhauser, Schocken, New York 1976, pp. 198-236.
